


with many eyes, we went and saw

by wanderNavi



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canon-Typical Violence, Genocide, weird alchemy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-01-16 11:26:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21270281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: Ishval was terrible the first time. The smell of smoke and dust clung to everything, especially the white cloth draped over everyone’s shoulders, grimy with dirt and blood and no one could hide from the reminders of what they were doing. Restoring peace through genocide.It was worse the second time.Out here, there was never enough water, but in the medical tents, Alphonse was able to scrape together enough for a much-needed pot of coffee. The grounds were brought in from outside he explained, and he was trying to stretch it out with thinner, watered-down servings. Maes didn’t mind; the biting cold of desert night was falling and he needed what sleep his exhausted body could snatch.Thanks to an egregiously imbalanced alchemy circle, Al lands back on the eve of the Ishval Order of Extermination. He’s less certain how or why Maes Hughes came along for the ride.





	1. a blackbird sang by the windowsill

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the Discord crew, y’all are lovely and encouraged this madness.
> 
> Ostensibly, this is written for 2019's NaNoWriMo since fanfic is apparently now an allowed category.
> 
> The amount of times the tag “Genocide” appears in my wips spreadsheet is mildly alarming. This fic does deal extensively and maybe graphically with the acts of mass violence in FMA. The opening chapters especially deal with Ishval with examples and influences drawn from various real-world modern tragedies. At the same time, keep in mind that I am not a trained historian.

_The sun rose over the shell-swept height,_   
_ The guns are over the way,_   
_ And a soldier turned from the toil of the night_   
_ To the toil of another day,_   
_ And a bullet sang by the parapet_   
_ To drive in the new-turned clay._

\-- “August 1914” by May Wedderburn Cannan

* * *

A report hasn’t officially been kicked up the chain yet but landed on Al and Ed’s doorstep first instead. Whoever he was, the perpetrator’s sloppy and left the chalk remains of alchemic circles at the scene. Al passed the next photograph from the stack to Ed who shared a scowl of distaste at the scrawl. Elise sniffled in her father’s lap.

Alphonse flicked a concerned glance at his niece and asked, “Should she be in bed? It sounds like she’s catching Henry’s cold.”

“It’s not just her, all of us are catching it.” Ed bounced a knee up and down and placed a hand against her forehead. She sniffed again. “Doesn’t feel like a fever yet. Do you want to stay, baby girl?”

“Unh.” Elise made a grab for the evidence folder. Alphonse hastily pushed the more gruesome details out of her reach while Ed shrugged and said, “Suit yourself.”

Turning back to the typed summaries, Alphonse smacked against the incomprehensible wall of nonsense once again. Police scrapped together what they could – not much – of the escalating series of assaults and disappearances in a small province out in the West Area. Alphonse found a trail and maybe a hint of where the target would try to hit next or where he’d set down for his rotten roost but grasping a motive would be far more helpful. Evidence indicated he had some old-school training in alchemy and was still trying to incorporate the old tenants despite how many years it was now since the field collectively abandoned the outdated methods.

“I’ll go by myself. It’ll probably take longer for me to head out west and back than to take care of this,” Al said.

“What? Al, no,” Ed protested over Elise’s waving hands. “I’ll go with you.”

A witness testimony transcript flapped in Elise’s fist. It hits Ed’s chin. “Da_aad_ take me, take me,” she whined, interrupted with a sniffle.

“Nope, not while you’re sick.”

“I’m not sick,” she protested.

Al laughed at the lapful of squirming five-year-old his brother tried wrestling back into some semblance of calm. To make things worse for his brother, he said, “If you come it’ll be overkill. Brother, I can take care of this on my own, trust me.”

“Al –”

“At least until Henry’s fever breaks. And soon Elise is going to catch the flu too,” he noted wryly to Ed’s grudging defeat. “You should be here with your kids until they get better. Your family needs you.”

“Alright,” Ed grumbled. “Stay safe.”

Alphonse reassured him with, “I’ll call you when I get there,” and swept the evidence files all back into its folder and shoved it back into his suitcase.

“But I’m not sick!”

* * *

Like the scene of too many bad setups Al encountered before with his brother, three days of further investigations, interviews, and follow-ups deposited Al in a corner of town with the general disheveled air of old books tossed into an attic and forgotten. The streets bled into the countryside with a splatter of run-down, semi-abandoned real estate pushing out of the ground like dried out stalks of old gardens overrun with weeds. The local population and economic growth hadn’t expanded enough to repurpose the brick and steel buildings.

Going by the wobbly transmutation circles painted on the ground and up the brick and plaster walls of a squat, two-story number, someone else had repurposed this one. Al squinted from a safe distance at the uneven lines and symbols. Even with these complete specimens in front of him compared to the disrupted remains in the photographs, he still struggled to put together what he’s supposed to see here. New and old clashed and choked each other, twisting intent and purpose into almost unreadable scrawls.

In the silence, Al cautiously approached closer. It wasn’t just new and old strangling each other into near uselessness, the circle seemed to flicker and warp before his eyes. The wavering cleared with each blink but as he peered at each circle longer, the paints started crawling and shifting.

Unnerved, he clapped his hands and interrupted all the circles he could see with cracks in the earth and spikes protruding out of crumbling plaster. No alarms rang as he paced the perimeter of the building and disabled all the potential traps he could find. When he found himself back at the building’s front entrance, he stalled, still heard nothing from within the walls. A glance up showed small windows set high on the walls just under the roof’s eaves, a few planes of glass with cracks and others tilted open.

Al hauled himself up the side of the building and peered inside in a hole punched into a window made opaque with dust and dirty rain. The cavernous room inside was empty of life that he could see, but he hissed a breath of alarm at the giant circle taking up almost the whole floor. He’d only seen a few circles as large and none of them had been good news. Worse, while the circles outside felt like hunting for an oasis through a desert’s heat mirage, glancing at the floor below for just a few minutes brought queasy nausea up unbidden.

The transmutation circle shouldn’t have even worked, considering how it was the most unbalanced thing Al had ever seen and even looking at it straight on gave him a headache, so he kept it in the corner of his eyes instead as he hauled himself in through the windows and clambered down. His boots hit the ground with a thump that weakly echoed.

People had been disappearing somewhat indiscriminately on regards of sex, age, location, and socioeconomic standing for the last few weeks. Reports came in according to an expanding circle around a town northwest of here. But when military police raided the suspected base there, they found scrubbed circles and nothing else. A few days later reports trickled in to the southeast and ever since, everyone’s been on a merry chase.

Al strode over to side rooms, breaking locks as he went, searching for papers and notes. To create something so large and original as the circle Al had never seen before in the central room, this alchemist must have kept research in somewhere, coded or not. Hidden among yellowed, old cargo records, Al found _something_ and didn’t have time to start flipping through and prying out its secrets when a hoarse voice yelled, “Breaking and entering’s not nice.”

Al’s eyes flew to the man – patchy facial hair, grease and grime accumulated on his skin and clothing, eyes just too bright in the distance between him and Al, someone’s been living rough recently – and more alarmingly at the sluggishly bleeding body in his grip. How hadn’t Al heard the door opening for the man’s entrance?

“Not nice to poke around private business without permission,” the man growled with that burning gravel voice. “Could find something no one wants to see or know.”

The body landed with a wet slap on the concrete floor where it was dropped by the man’s feet.

“No, I think I do want to know,” Al said around swallowing a deep breath. The signs hadn’t lined up correctly, but if all the abductions and this body was for human transmutation, Al was going to scream in frustration.

“No can do,” said the man’s boiling anger and he rushed Al.

* * *

Alphonse came to with a groan, carefully sitting up from the cold concrete floor. A stale silence met his ringing ears. He blinked past the drumbeat of his pulse marching through his head at the still room around him. The walls and floor were back to their dusty, slightly crumbling flat plains. All signs of the fight, the debris, the chalk, the body, the splatters of blood, were gone. The giant circle that flashed a sickly white was gone.

Slowly getting to his feet, Al mused that alright, maybe things would have gone better if Ed was here and pulled a spear out of the ground. Or tried. The alchemic stuck and snagged, like pulling against the unyielding grip of sticky glue. Alarmed, he yanked again and this time the matrix came free and the transmutation performed smoothly. Yet it still felt like a thin film of oil coated him. Had something happened on a massive scale in the ground while he was out?

He rushed out of the building. Scans for the rogue alchemist turned up nothing but storm clouds swiftly gathering on the horizon. The weather report promised clear skies of the rest of the week. What was going on? The repaired interiors, the lack of traps outside, his alchemy, the clouds.

He broke into a run back into town. If something happened to the land, the effect would be even more pronounced back in town with a population of people bound to notice something. Besides, if the alchemist got away, he might’ve tried slipping away into town. Not that Al found any recent tracks leading away from the abandoned district though.

And not that returning to the town coughed up any more clues. No one Al stopped saw anybody like the alchemist and Al didn’t have any further leads on if he had any plans beyond setting up a base here. He considered seeing if the police branches picked up anything else beyond the chicken scratch pile they had the last time Al visited, but he doubted they gathered anything new in the last few hours since Al swung by last right before heading out to the confrontation. Besides, alchemy still strained against Al and that was a far greater concern. Al already checked out of his tiny hotel room that morning and the sooner he hopped onto a train and made his way back to Ed, the better.

Alphonse nearly walked right past the train station when he hadn’t cross by the side entrance in the expanded wing as he expected. Instead of the doors he walked out of on arrival at the town, there was a cramped bookstore and dinner squeezed shoulder to shoulder across the street from a large room known as the local library branch.

He’d simply lost his way, Alphonse decided as he rounded the corner to the station’s main entrance instead. His travels with and without his brother didn’t take him through here often and he hasn’t memorized the ways yet. The front entrance was still all short marble steps, slightly gray with grime, brass framing heavy wooden doors with fogged up inlaid windows. A custodian took advantage of the slower mid-afternoon business to mop the tiled floors. Alphonse stepped around a wet patch towards the ticket booths.

“One-way ticket to Resembool, please,” Al told the attendant.

The attendant shook his head. “Sorry, no tickets to Resembool. They still haven’t finished repairs. I can get you to Halle just a stop north of Resembool though. Will that work?”

Repairs? “Oh, um, yes, that would?” A car ride from Halle to Resembool wouldn’t take too long and even walking if Al had no other options wouldn’t be too bad.

Alphonse got a nod. “One-way ticket to Halle. Next train to East Area’s in four hours at Platform 2. You’ll transfer lines at Stendal and again at East City and arrive at Halle about two days from now.”

With his ticket paid for, Al also bought a newspaper from the stand slightly further down the hall to pass the time. As with most of the rest of the station, the platforms were also sparsely occupied with seats on benches empty aplenty. He walked past a small knot of soldiers in uniform waiting at Platform 3 and past a mother rocking a carriage back and forth, failing to soothe her crying baby. Al dropped onto a bench and set his traveling case beside his feet and finally unfolded the newspaper.

Above King Bradley’s unflinching stare, the top headline screamed, “Fuhrer Signs Executive Order of Extermination.”

The thin pages nearly ripped with the spasm of his shocked fingers clenching as Alphonse yelped, “_What?_”

What was the station doing selling a newspaper almost twenty years old, a whole _stack_ of newspapers twenty years old, and this one specifically? Al scanned the page unseeingly, flicked through and past the decree reprinted inside and slapped it all back closed. The baby continued wailing.

He strode back to the periodicals kiosk because he paid for today’s paper, not whatever this was shaping up to be. “Military Escalates Ishval Conflict,” stubbornly declared a different journal. “1908” repeated the rows of pages.

The warehouse had looked the same enough, if slightly less dusty and without chalk and debris everywhere. The town had a different hum in its air and a dinner instead of a train station extension. The interference clogging up his alchemy. The scrawled component yanking on time’s pigtails.

“Oh no.”

* * *

Maes awoke to the barracks: the sharp smell of sweat and unwashed bodies, an iron undercurrent of blood and injuries, the spicy tinge to salves fighting infection, burned air of unfueled, alchemic explosions. Dust in and on the coarse sheets under his hands, his itching skin, the air, everything. He knew where he was even before he opened his eyes, despite it being years since he was last here.

Ishval.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wanderNavi: There are two options: I write about Maes Hughes or I have a hilarious time with the Elrics time traveling.  
wanderNavi: Evidently, I only know how to write two tones.  
wrave: time travel is something i love  
wrave: so is maes hughes  
wrave: so i will read either way  
sugasuga: MASS HUGHES TIME TRAVEL


	2. irresistible, he sang the knife’s prayer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maes attempts to process things. Al realizes his effective unemployment and gives himself a new job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, the more macabre things that get mentioned and probably should have warnings for: mass graves, the inability to dig mass graves, human experimentation, general trauma on the frontlines and in the aftermath

**PART ONE: INTO THE MOUTH OF HELL, THE CRUCIBLE**

Maes did _not_ miss the uneven ridge that stabbed at his back between his second and third left rib every time he laid down to rest during the war. It felt like a constant bruise on top of the already constant hazards of getting shot and cursed at everyday by people defending their children and homes. If he tried shifting his roll to the side in any direction, a different facet of the ground’s unforgiving geometry would dig in instead. He learned to live with the reminder that he was alive enough to experience the nuisance.

Getting shot point blank in the chest after being stabbed by unreasonably sharp and long nails in the shoulder _hurt_. The hurt didn’t last long, yes, but that was because those kinds of experiences tended towards the fatal.

Camp chatter past the stiff tent fabric continued over marching footsteps while Maes tried and failed to comprehend his discovery with the maps, getting stabbed, getting _shot_, and the dirt somehow flung onto the ceiling of his canvas tent. He was no longer stabbed but going by the dull pain in his right arm, was still shot though more of a graze than a slug in the heart. What was he doing here? _How_ was Maes undeniably here?

Maes had never heard of alchemy being able to fling a man many kilometers away from where he was, and swap around some wounds while at it. Since the military would be all over anything of the sort, this alchemy couldn’t exist in Amestris and couldn’t explain why he was in Ishval instead of at home enjoying dinner with his darling family.

The exploding roar of artillery echoed and washed up against Maes’ concentration with the ungainly coordination of a truck transporting a marching band’s equipment crashing into a concrete wall at sixty miles an hour. He found his glasses, jammed them on, and scrambled to his feet. Once the alchemists arrived in force to Ishval, the relentless destruction destroyed not just the architecture but also the ground itself. Foundations under homes shifted and collapsed. Only the truly stubborn tried rebuilding on the scorched earth and Amestris kept a deployment in the region to chase survivors off their ancestral land. In the few years since stable society’s annihilation, the most stringent orders of extermination were unofficially relaxed and unspoken policy was less hellbent on ending lives. The current Ishvalan bases had no need for artillery.

Either the hell of the afterlife was more mundane so far than more extreme expectations of the general population or – his mind skipped a beat – Maes had not just leaped through space but also through time into the past which was frankly also a version of hell. Which again, he’d never heard a single whisper of the military or alchemy possessing this capability. High command would have been tripping over itself if it existed.

They destroyed more than lives and property in Ishval. Maes transferred into the conflict too late to witness the mass funerals, one village grieving for its brother and sister towns. The culture wasn’t equipped for so many deaths so rapidly, with more piling up while they prayed and cried and sang rites. At the final funeral, central command took umbrage to the gathered protest and shot into the crowd of mourners, packed together for the pickings.

Even by then, the ability to grieve was wearing down against the hunger spreading among the civilians like a slow acting poison as the means of food production and supply choked to a halt. Maes was never assigned to one of the patrols securing the borders with orders to shoot all attempts to escape from the violence, but he heard their stories well enough. Rites for the dead grew aborted. Soon the bodies would outnumber the living. Because digging could conceal weapons caches, mines, and escape tunnels, the military hounded any Ishvalan caught with shovels or equipment. Corpses laid in the open. The smell that traveled through the dry air.

Maes swiped a hand over his face and stumbled over to the bag slumped on the ground, presumably his pack. Papers poked from its open mouth and he pulled them out for inspection. Field reports and briefings sandwiched letters written on soft paper with careful script. Gracia, he thought with a wistful smile tugging the corner of his lips.

“So what the hell did I do to be here?”

* * *

Maes went looking for Roy and didn’t find him at the mess halls or huddled against the frigid night at any of the campfires. In the distance, the roaring retort of artillery rolled over the never ending whine of shells. Weaving past another cluster of men lugging along bundles of cloth and lumber, Maes arrived at where Roy’s barracks were assigned.

The barracks haven’t been built yet.

“Huh,” Maes said and reset his course for the haphazard ploy of a train station set up at the northwest end of camp. The plywood and gravel heap should have fallen apart instantly, but military engineering fueled by desperation, budgetary cost cutting, and naïve resilience held it together until a month before the first troop recall. It survived machine guns from ambush firefights, two separate arson attempts, an accidental fire, and seven years of general mayhem. According to the rumors and the report, it took the Ishvalian sappers too many tons of homemade and Aerugo supplied explosives to finally reduce the station into a smoking, twisted total loss with a new four-fold floor square footage than originally constructed. It’s still an ugly and sorry sight when Maes reached it and it was an even sorrier first impression to their man-made hell of a battlefield.

He found the day’s newspaper in the corner as he remembered, dutifully kept updated by some hapless private forced each morning to drag several pounds of paper out and drag several pounds of paper back as the stack went untouched.

Today’s paper claimed the date was summer snapping at the heels of 1908’s spring which meant Maes would be reporting back to the Martha sector and not watch Major Bateson’s leg get shot off this time. A letter from Gracia should arrive in about a week’s time with news on the latest article she wrote for her column. The canteen ran out of apples a week after that, or maybe that already happened.

“Welcome back, Roy,” Maes murmured as he reread the above the fold, front page article announcing for all to see, “Fuhrer Signs Executive Order of Extermination.” He glanced at Fuhrer Bradley’s harsh face with his head sliced off from his body by the paper’s crease. Maes tossed the paper back onto its pile and walked away in search of answers and a way to blend in.

* * *

He wasn’t quite alright about this situation still and this train car was a confusing blend of old and new. They stopped making cars in this aesthetic a few years ago and were steadily replacing them with the newer cars with a fondness for plastic and metal paneling instead of thin sheets of wood. At the same time, the car Al sat in had the cleanliness only something newly off the production line kept. So, confusing.

Alphonse kept the newspaper with its damning headlines. Out of boredom, he already read it front to back several hours ago. Being back in time, it hurt, it _frustrated_ him because he and Ed and everyone had come so far, had done so much already, with more progress and life to work towards and still discover. Their ambitions and goals had been realized once and they charged forward with more.

Being back in time threw out all of Al’s progress and he had no idea if there was a way to return back to the future. Considering coming back required an unholy blend of alchemic structures that could only be achieved with Father and the Homunculi gone, Al didn’t expect a ticket back to his point in the timeline any time soon. Nor do the results of alchemic snap back to original states after a set period of time; he couldn’t rely on a convenient countdown to when the rubber band released him back home.

He was stuck and that was _truly_ frustrating because on top of the general warm glow of life satisfaction, Al also had a fantastic love and sex life, thank you, and now that was gone as well.

With a sigh, Al settled in for a nap that would hopefully last him through most of the travel across Amestris’ Central Area.

* * *

Alphonse wasn’t sure how long it was going to take people to notice that the coins and bills he’s been paying for his meals and train tickets have a year from the future printed and stamped on. He didn’t envy anyone responsible for figuring out how the currency was both never in circulation and not counterfeit. Suddenly loosing access to his bank accounts and paychecks were of much greater concern to him.

He didn’t have much cash left and no job anymore either. Had he been heading to anywhere other than Resembool, he might had been in far more trouble. Still, he walked from Halle to Resembool rather than renting a car or hailing a taxi. The meal car on the trains ate more into his wallet and remaining funds than he’d prefer.

Resembool really hadn’t changed much over the years. There were still fields rolling to the clear blue embrace of the sky. There were still the sheep everywhere with their painted numbers and letters on their sides. The still slightly charred guts of the train station exposed to the weather was a slight shock, but Ad remembered gaping at the wreck many years ago while adults buzzed over his head with confusion and fear and anger. There had been a declaration left behind among the wounded and trapped, an accusation about sheep and wool.

The house stood among its hills. Afterwards, they hadn’t rebuilt it. When they both reached twenty, Ed finally conceded to clear out the charred and rotted remains and put its spirit into the dirt. With Ed and Winry spending most of the year in Rush Valley whenever Ed had something resembling an address and Al spending even more time on the road, frequently out of the country entirely, it hadn’t made sense to repair the stone foundation or find contractors to build a new kitchen and nursery. Even during the house’s last years, it felt dead. Al and Ed returned from Dublith to thick layers of dust muffling all breath.

Alphonse swallowed unevenly. From here, still about twenty minutes’ walk away, the house felt just as dead as he remembered. None of the windows were open to let in the soft, cool breeze and early afternoon sunlight. It may had been the distance, but the painted walls seemed smudged, with dust and dirt accumulated since there hadn’t been an annual paint touchup. Trisha Elric was still dead. The leather grip of his suitcase handle shifted uneasily against his clammy palms.

In a heart piercing moment, Al wished desperately that he could see his mother one last time, hear the laugh he’d forgotten under the weight of over twenty years of a life lived fully. He wanted her to be standing by the open doorway, gazing out at the golden beams of light parting the clouds above, and greet him as he approached on the rough dirt path, bring him inside and seat him down at the dinner table with a fully cooked meal. If only the transmutation circle flung him back just a few years further.

Al shifted directions, turned his head away from the house he hadn’t seen for the majority of his life, and made his way over to the Rockbell home and clinic. He has no idea how he’ll explain himself, despite multiple tries over the train ride and walk to cobble together something. But Pinako knew his father and this was about on par with the strangeness of a near immortal philosopher stone man. And speaking of his father, if anyone had the first idea where he was right now, it’d be Pinako.

Den noticed his arrival first and barked up a storm as he made his approach to the automail shop. He rushed at him, bumping against his legs, and Al laughed and tried to hold back his licking and overenthusiasm. “Hey, easy there Den, old boy.”

“Den! Down!”

The dog bound back to Winry Rockbell and Al stared for a moment at her. She was … wow, she was tiny. Al really was in the past, Winry was _young_ and a kid and Den was alive and the younger versions of his brother and hopefully himself were also around and kicking. He kept staring in surprise as she said, “Sorry about that mister. Den can get a bit enthusiastic. Who are you?”

He had _not_ thought this through as he should have. “Ah, I’m Al. Is Pinako in?”

She sized him up for a few moments more, looking at each limb, then nodded and rushed back into the house. “Grandma, there’s a guy outside that wants you!”

Henry was definitely her son.

Alphonse approached the stone steps up to the house’s green door and glanced around for any flashes of golden blond. If Winry’s here, then the brothers might also be around. Then again, he considered the growth in the fields he passed on the way, they might already be in their apprenticeship.

Footsteps shepherded Pinako arrival and Winry’s return.

“How can I help you?” Pinako asked. A flash – confusion? no, suspicion – crossed her face. Winry danced in place with restless curiosity to the side behind her.

“Hello Mrs. Rockbell,” that tasted odd to say, “There’s something I wanted to discuss with you. If that’s okay?”

Ed had complained once, “How are you still able to look so freaking earnest, you’re over twenty,” and Al wielded it relentlessly.

“Well, come on in.” Pinako held the door open as Al climbed the front steps with Den bounding at his feet, tail wagging. As he crossed the threshold, she turned to her granddaughter and asked, “Winry, have you finished the endocrine chapters?”

Stemmed from learning more about this latest guest, Winry deflated, cast a last speculative glance at Al’s legs, and said, “No. I’ll go then.”

Pinako hummed in acknowledgement and led Alphonse into the small room that doubled for the home clinic’s reception and consultation room. Al nudged a model automail hand out of the way and sat in a wooden chair reserved for guests. She took a seat across from him, pipe in her hand where it hadn’t been a moment ago. When Al tried a disarming smile, she said, “Only family I know Hohenheim having are his two boys. And I haven’t seen anyone else with golden hair and eyes like those three. So who are you?”

“It’s hard to explain.” He sheepishly rubbed a head against his neck. “I’m Alphonse. From the future?”

Pinako smoked in silence.

“Okay, this is up there among the weird things I’ve seen.”

“Ah, you accepted that pretty quickly.”

She narrowed her eyes and flicked her pipe at his face. “I can see the resemblance. You and your brother doing well?”

He nearly knocked a leg off a stand while leaning back into the chair, relaxed if still slightly caught off guard. “Yeah, it’s been great. A bit chaotic, but great. I’d love to catch up? On stuff that hasn’t happened yet? But first, do you have any idea where my father is right now?”

* * *

The first alchemists arrived within the week and this really was happening. Maes has the misfortune of being in the welcome party of a team coming back from their inaugural mission. The alchemist in his new uniform still stiff with the quartermaster’s folds walked straight for the barrack with an ashen face. His squad mates shook their heads at Maes’ gaze and dissolved into the camp’s crowd. One’d already pulled out a pack of dirty playing cards.

Maes got sent on a mission himself when Roy and Riza arrived at the front lines. Dead on his feet from barely catching sleep while not on watch, Maes spent two weeks flushing out pockets of resistance fighters and determinately dodging all close quarter encounters with the warrior priest. Only when the ammunition the squad brought began running dangerously low did they gather the remaining wounded and dead that the field medics hadn’t already snatched and returned to the main command camp. Maes traded the last of his cardstock chocolate rations for a pair of knives to replace the two he lost to an enterprising woman.

He held the blade up for a closer inspection at the bubbled hilt. “What happened here? Did you stick this over a lighter?”

“More like a close encounter with a state alchemist. Filched it off a victim who was just a bit too close to a fire ball.” The major shrugged and popped a chocolate square into his mouth.

About a month know since he was murdered, the secret Maes discovered spent every waking moment on base clawing for escape. “Flame alchemy? Do you know where this alchemist is?” Maes banked his eagerness and asked.

His answer came with a shake of the head, “Nah.”

Maes left the man to it.

Doctor Marco’s team was undoubtedly already at work here, separated from the regular forces by five layers of bureaucratic bullshit – that’s just what Maes could see on the surface – and decidedly out of his reach without any of his vetted subordinates and allies. And whoever orchestrated the ongoing creation of the philosopher stones along with the still numbingly alarming giant transmutation circle undoubtedly guarded its current operations closely.

For something of this scale, at least some of the military’s high command must be involved but he couldn’t imagine who. Did any of those war dogs question the overwhelming force employed here in Ishval? Did Fuhrer Bradley suspect a conspiracy among his closet allies yet? A conspiracy, given Riviere, might span generations almost back to the founding of Amestris?

So Maes made a general nuisance of himself around base, waiting for his and Roy’s mission schedules to line up already. He sent Gracia four letters in almost as many days to distract himself. Then he ran out of paper and that failed to work anymore.

Hoarding gossip only went so far, undercut by how he already knew the broad stroke of how the stories played out, spoiling the fun. For lack of much else to do after he got his cigarette rations swindled out at cards again, Maes chased conspiracy theories. How many spies were in the military? In civilian alchemic guilds? In the local and national governments? Liore’s bloodshed only triggered after the Elric brothers dramatically unveiled the false cult, but the town’s placement was too convenient despite the lack of military involvement on the surface.

And just what, Maes prodded while staring at the shadows across his tent’s ceiling and holding sleep at arm’s length, did a circle of that size create?

* * *

Al left the family funds untouched for the kids, even if it left _him_ with only a couple hundred cens to his name, barely enough for a few coups of coffee and two minutes at a payphone, never mind cross country train tickets. In exchange for revealing the real reason why he and his brother chased after alchemic mentorship so relentlessly, Pinako lent him some money to soften her swearing promises to give the boys an earful. Al books it out of her house as quickly as he could after a supper he was shanghaied into. She was still swearing when he left, only partially mollified.

Alphonse went to the north first because near as Pinako could figure, that’s where Hohenheim struck out to first. He also picked up an order for sheet metal and spare part for her to help subsidize her paying for Alphonse’s train tickets. If Hohenheim had ever been in the major cities Al traveled through, it was years ago, and no one remembered one blonde man among Amestris’ many. Al also tried searching for the droplets of Philosopher Stones Hohenheim seeded the ground, but to no avail.

Increasingly nervous about the pace of developments in Ishval while he was stuck paging through old alchemy textbooks on another almost unbearably long train ride, Al returned to Resembool in a little over two weeks’ time, shaking his head to Pinako’s question.

“Thanks for the parts, Al,” Pinako said instead. “Even with the train station down, we still get plenty of business from the east, being closer to the front than Rush Valley. I’ve been sending our past and current customers out on the lookout. Since they’re soldiers returning home on leave or discharge all over Amesteris, we might find the old man soon.”

Al smiled in relief. “Thanks, Pinako. Things are getting a bit tight timeline-wise.”

She puffed a breath or two on her pipe, then pulled a lever on the conversation, switching tracks. “If you still need spare cash, come help me in the clinic. It won’t be too demanding, more about passing tools when Winry and I need them, help us pick up orders and deliveries. See if your alchemy can help fine tune some delicate parts.”

With the Elric house still standing, Al could uneasily spend his nights in its rooms, but food would still be out of hand. Like his earlier reluctancy to pull on the family funds entrusted to the Elric names, Al rather leave the money available to the younger Ed and Al. Gratefully, Al said, “Much appreciated.”

Pinako’s wide network of past patients quickly brought back results, abet with false flags. Some were too long ago to be reliable and some were just lookalikes. Al jittered in a tight circumference around Resembool and counted the days before he’d have to give up the search until he returned from his plans in Ishval.

Disconcertingly, the belongings of Winry’s parents were still strewn about the Rockbell house. The couple had been in Ishval long enough now that Winry and Pinako naturally set things aside to make room for their own belongings and activities, primarily automail parts and pieces. Pinako had Winry taking apart and putting back together defunct and busted limbs. One afternoon, Winry proudly showed Al her mother’s scrawl inside the cover of an anatomy textbook: “Property of Sarah and Yurih Rockbell.”

“Grandma said I could help my parents with surgeries too when they come back,” Winry told Al, suffuse with ten-year-old pride and glee.

“That’s amazing,” Al agreed, because honestly, it completely was. The local schools never stone a chance against her, Al, and Ed despite many best attempts.

Finally, Pinako yelled through the house for Al, away from playing study partner with Winry, to come here. She stood by the landline. “Just got a call from woman named Clara out west in Morda. She said she spotted someone matching Hohenheim’s appearance a few days ago.”

“I’ll head out immediately. Who knows if he’s left already,” Al said and ran back to the Elric house to pack his suitcase. He hopped onto the next train heading out of Halle, the station staff now thoroughly familiar with him.

* * *

Al hadn’t the chance to know his father well. Hohenheim left the house while Al was too young to retain the memories, and their time together leading up to the Promised Day was short and in unusual circumstances. He and Ed never fully saw what brought Hohenheim and their mother together, but Al thought he saw more than Ed did. And now, seeing the man again…

“Hey Dad. Uh, mind if we talk outside?” Alphonse was going to have to start getting used to the flabbergast expressions, huh. “It’s kind of a long story and it gets a bit crazy at parts.”

“Alphonse?”

“Yeah. Actually, um, you can finish your meal first.” He did ambush his father in the middle of the diner’s lunch rush.

Hohenheim glanced down at his forgotten plate and shook his head. “No, I’ll just get it bagged. Give me a moment.”

He called a waiter over and Alphonse trailed in silence after him as he approached the counter to pay the cashier. He watched his father’s tense back and stuffed his hands into his pant’s pockets out of the restless nervousness spilling between them. Leftovers in hand, Hohenheim led them both out of the restaurant and towards a tiny municipal park.

“Alphonse, how? You’re supposed to be eight.” Hohenheim was not the kind of man to shrug or gesture helplessly, but he seemed to want to in this moment.

Al had less qualms and shrugged. “It’s time travel? Dimension travel? I don’t really know? I’m here now and well.” He watched Hohenheim carefully. “I know about Xerxes. And the Dwarf in the Flask.”

“You do? Hmm.” Hohenheim glanced away into the tiny man-made pond. “That’s a bit. How?”

Al shrugged again. “Don’t know. I didn’t see the Gate on my way here. And well, you’re a living philosopher stone. There are homunculi that can come back from the dead pulling the strings of this nation. The nation itself is a transmutation circle. A lot of things about our lives are ‘a bit.’”

Hohenheim laughed, “That is true. So, what did you want to talk about? The future?”

So Al told him, as Hohenheim had told Al in Liore, about the day of reckoning, the Promised Day. About past and the future and what he learned and discovered. About human transmutations and human sacrifices and the winding tale to defeat a false god. Hohenheim listened silently, eyes kept on the still waters, glasses catching the weak sunlight. “We did manage it, but I want to do it better,” Al said. “There were some people that shouldn’t have suffered and died, and I think I have a chance to change that.”

“You want to meddle with time? You think you’ll be able to?” So many questions.

“Yes. There’s no point in not trying,” Al answered. “For one, I think it’s time for you to go home. And second, I’m heading east to Ishval.”

Hohenheim turned his head to stare at him at that, shock across his hard face again. “Ishval’s a power keg and has been for some time. Now that the State Alchemists have been sent in, the Homunculi have already achieved the bloodshed they need for the circle. To go in now would be an unnecessary risk.”

Al shook his head. “The doctors Rockbell are there. Helping the wounded and the civilians the military should be protecting, not killing and experimenting on. And a lot of people I care about are there too in the fight. If there’s anywhere to start making a difference, it’s Ishval. General Mustang, Scar, I’ve told you about them. Ishval is a beginning.”

He kicked a heel out, savored the thump in his bones as his foot struck the ground. “Go home Dad. It’s not right leaving a pair of kids alone in a house like that. Trying to bring back Mom didn’t go well for us.

“The military almost did more to raise Ed and I after he joined them. The first time Ed saw you in years, he proceeded to dig up what we created instead of healing like he should have. And I didn’t get to know you until it was almost the Promised Day and then you were gone again. Pinako said you used up all the souls in your Philosopher Stone.

“And you have me to help now and I know some people we can trust to help us take down the Homunculi too. So. You shouldn’t spend all your time on the road.”

“Trisha. She really is gone.” Al caught the pained grimace cross his father’s face. “I didn’t even know.”

“Go home,” Al said again, with pained sympathy in his words. “I’ll meet you in Resembool in a few months’ time.”

“Last time I saw you, you were three. It’ll be a shock to see you as a child and grown at the same time,” Hohenheim said with a resigned huff of laughter. “Alright Alphonse. I’ll go. Be careful in Ishval.”

“You too Dad.”

* * *

Only thanks to a tentative connection maintained with Scar had Al first learned about the oral history project set up by some upstart professor in East City University recording the survivors’ tales about the extermination and aftermath. Scar himself hadn’t participated, but Al remembered enough about his brother and well, Kimblee was a disaster in himself. Al could draw his conclusions.

Some of the Ishvalans couldn’t go back and not for lack of means. They couldn’t even face the pictures of Roy in the newspapers without remembering how their homes were annihilated with a clap and a snap. How could they face the destruction smearing hometowns – where they were born and raised as their parents and their grandparents were and as their children and grandchildren should have been – into an unrecognizable corpse?

Plenty of the accounts Al read told about the land. About looking back with a frantic last glance over the shoulder, a hand shielding a child’s eye, at the smoke and dust rising over the ruins and the fires spreading. Explosions scooped out the guts of what could never be home again in perfect inversed domes. Monuments and landmarks that lasted years of sandstorms were obliterated in an impact.

A woman’s voice, scratchy under her accent and remembered fear and talisman of grief:

“We left, of course we left. My son, my daughter, they were young, so young, five, seven. I hide them in the house, away from the windows and the streets. Plead, stay quiet, stay quiet. Everyone's blood boiled crazy. I tell my husband, look at what's happened, what's been happening. Everyone's blood going crazy. I tell his sister, you're pregnant, the men are filling the street, the soldiers are coming like locusts. The soldiers were here for the men, but they don't start with the men. You're pregnant, our children, the soldiers started with the children. Not the men.

“The trains were closing; how could our children cross the desert? Her, my sister-in-law's pregnant. Our mother is old. They can't make the walk through the desert with those escaping to the east. We can barely make the walk down the street. I find a bullet in my door, where I scratch marks of how the children grow.

“They arrest the men and women. They killed that child first.”


	3. a taste at the floodgate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maes works on his suspensions of disbelief. Al arrives at hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I increasingly regret writing this in past tense instead of present tense.
> 
> In this chapter: more corpses, human experimentation

They’re all tired. The tremors of explosions ran under their feet, from the northeast, from the west. The blasts carved open walls, punched holes through buildings, so the soldiers could run down the streets through a corridor of cooking pots and cloth dolls and wooden carvings and rotting fruit left on the counter, a hand towel crumpled and forgotten on a counter, family photos nailed to the plaster and others shredded by glass shards when the frames shattered on impact from hitting the floor after being knocked off by the shockwaves. Picking his way back from a mission gone sideways, Maes nearly tripped over a destroyed loom, the snarled mess of yarn in reds and yellows and oranges entangled over his foot like a snare trap. He extracted himself and looked up, saw the overflowing baskets of finished cloth, the table with sheers and pushpins, elaborate manakins lovingly sanded to a smooth caramel polish, and what could only be a wedding gown, glinting with gems and beads and cascading embroidery, just finished.

“Shit,” said Maes and he ran out of the room. Machine gun fire chased after him.

Roy barely nodded at Maes’ approach on his return to base, after his commanding officer gave him thirty hours’ rest. Maes took the seat by his grim eyed friend and slit open the latest letter from Gracia that survived the trip to the frontlines and past the censors.

“I’ve never seen you with any letters,” Maes commented. Roy glanced away from the lukewarm mug he’d been staring into with the intensity of a dedicated psychic diving how much bodily harm the liquid inside and its dredges would inflict on his whole digestive system. Maes hoped he wouldn’t drink it. “No one at home to write to or hear from?”

Roy hummed the hum of the barely conscious and cleaned out his mug in one go. Maes winced for him. Marginally more awake, Roy replied, “Not really their style. As long as they don’t receive a letter of condolence from the bureau, I think they’ll be as happy as they can be given the realities of war. And what would I write to them about here? It’s just carnage.”

This Roy was too sharp, Maes thought again in too few minutes. First time they met again, Roy looked at him with a frown tugging his mouth down and promising a tension headache between his eyes in due time. “You changed,” he said and Maes made a noise in agreement. Of course he had, he’d been deployed to Ishval about a year earlier than Roy and survived Central branch for several more years afterwards.

“So have you,” he said. This wasn’t the Roy that figured out how all the buttons of his persona were supposed to go together yet. He didn’t even fully register the men assigned with him, whereas Maes had gotten used to his possessive protection over his team out east.

Maes took out a patch of marginally clean cloth and wiped the grime off his glasses. “Really? Nothing to say?”

“No, Hughes. We aren’t all daring the universe to kill us off in clichés.” There, a ghost at an attempt at a joke. The mutant coffee was waking him up. He stood up stiffly. “Command wants me for something.”

Ideally, Maes could spend an hour or so sitting on his wooden box, numbing his ass on its rough, hard surface, while basking in Gracia’s letter. With a sigh, he tucked her letter inside is coat and lurched himself to his feet too. He said to Roy, who was already walking away, “Thought you just came off a mission too. What’s the higher-ups bugging you for so soon?”

“Not entirely sure, but I think I have an idea.” Roy called over his shoulder, “You don’t need to follow me around. Reply to your letter, Hughes.”

* * *

Maes ignored Roy’s earlier request and found him at the edge of the camp tugging on his gloves. “I’m not good at maintaining a continuous or pure flame,” Roy said. “But it’s better than Kimblee obliterating their bodies and complaining about the silence the whole time.”

“Need company?” Maes asked. Roy shook his head, paused, considered, and shrugged.

“It’s not pleasant,” he warned.

The decomposition will spread disease, the doctors warned, and command agreed, go out and remove those corpses. In this heat, the bodies that don’t dry out bloat faster, flashed their unnatural colors in death quicker. A few months on the front and they’d all gotten used to the faint smell, but still.

“Are we burning all the bodies?” Maes asked, upwind of the woodless pyre.

Roy wiped a trail of sweat off his forehead and shook his head no. “There are teams doing burials. I can’t be afforded to play cremator all day. And only the bodies close enough to camp. We aren’t cleaning out the towns.”

His flames would never burn pure enough to do anything other than belch heaving streams and rivers of black smoke, not with fuel like this. Ashy silence fell on them again, broken by a softer, “I heard some civilian detectives have been interested in keeping some of the bodies. Preserved for observation and study. It’ll …" Roy trailed off. “It’ll help with murder investigations and identifying missing bodies. Maybe. Can’t say I really understand.”

“Not really,” Maes answered. “Unless the police forces believe they’ll be patrolling desert parts in the future, the weather conditions here aren’t the same as in the rest of Amestris. Decomposition, insect ecosystems, it’ll be different.” He knew. The desert claimed its dead in ways he’d never seen anywhere else.

They didn’t speak another word until the last flames smoldered to dead embers. Shovels in hand, they gathered the remaining bones and dumped the pile of charred white into a dug pit, piled the soil back over and stamped it smooth as they could, so the winds couldn’t strip the layer off in slogging sheets of dust. Water would do the job far better, but that wasn’t remotely an option in the desert. The military had no water to spare for its victims.

Maes began heading back first. When the expected set of footsteps didn’t follow, he turned to catch Roy’s dark form just barely standing out against the deepening blue of the sky, shovel resting on his still shoulder. “Roy?”

“Using fire and alchemy. Using fire and alchemy together, that’s not how the Ishvalans buried their dead at all, is it Hughes?” his voice asked.

“No,” Maes said, stepped forward, and pulled his friend by his jacket back to the evening campfires.

The military didn’t have water, but it had spit and spite against rituals and gods aplenty.

* * *

The censors kept the wildest rumors from spreading past Ishval and all medical personnel that returned so far came back in pine boxes. The only reason the military base wasn’t aggressively short staffed on account of doctors and researchers was because it conscripted everyone it needed to make its balances.

The officer flicked through Al’s paperwork again. His jacket sat rumpled on his frame, like the rest of this tiny room with its crowded, crooked stack of boxes and table set just slightly off from ninety degrees compared to the walls. For the sixth time, Al fought back a cough from the sharp cigarette smoke filling the room.

“Alright, this looks in order.” One hand plucked the exhausted cigarette from the officer’s mouth and stuck it among a hoard of butts overfilling a strained ashtray. The other hand prowled through folders and selected a set of papers. Together, then hands lit another smoke. Al swallowed back a cough.

The officer tapped a slip at the top of the stack of sheets slide to Al’s side of the table. It wobbled against his leg with the movement. “This here’s a voucher for the train ticket. Gives you priority and a discount. Rest of these are your instructions. Read ‘em, follow ‘em.”

“Thank you,” Al wheezed and fled from the room.

Al’s relation with the military had always been, at best, contractual. A small “application fee” slipped to the officer would keep anyone from looking too hard into his falsified record. In the short run, the military’s need for support staff would also keep curious noses pointed in a different direction. In five days’ time, Al arrived at Ishval as a civilian contractor assisting the doctors.

The train spat Al out onto a platform that looked two or so sandstorms away from flying apart into the distance. He ducked through a sea of blue and pale white coats, the only man among the train passengers in a button down and slacks. Canvas flapped like dirty wings among the flock of tents rolling out for rows and rows. Al took in the sides of buildings defeated and cracked open. On the horizon, smoke rose.

He’s buffeted by the flow of bodies into the camp proper and most split off in the direction pointed out by a hand painted metal sign hung precariously on the corner of a building. Al went the other way, towards the civilian quarters.

First one researcher still in a lab coat pointed Al to a towering building which turned him away and sent him to the quartermaster who sent him to a command tent who chased him out to a tiny reception desk which shrugged and prodded him _else_where, until at last, after over an hour of bouncing from desk to desk and following directions from one side of camp to the other, Al arrived at the tent set aside for him. Exhausted from the relentless sunlight and with time to spare before his first shift with Doctor Heathrow at the hospital, Al flung his given bedroll onto the ground along with his increasingly heavy bag and flung himself down after it, thoroughly dusty clothing and all. Despite already sleeping on the train ride, he fell asleep in moments.

* * *

Doctor Heathrow barely came up to Al’s collarbone, one-inch heels on her pumps included, though this hardly stopped her running a critical eye over Al and harrumphing, “Fine, you’ll do.”

Her coat snapped behind her knees as she set a brisk pace Al jolted to match. “To start with, Mr. Elric,” she ignored the pair of men scrambling out of her way as she flew straight down the middle of the hallway with the divine right of way granted to a god’s chariot, “you’ll be working in the deep end today. We don’t have enough room in the morgue. You will be making room in the morgue. Claude will show you how.”

“Making room, ma’am?” Al asked. Was he burying bodies? How was this –

She yanked a door open, revealing stairs leading downward. “None of this ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ business. I am Doctor Heathrow. You address me as Doctor Heathrow. You have the muscle mass to carry heavy objects, and so you’ll be carrying heavy objects.”

A vibrating roar seized the building and rattled the steps beneath their feet. Al flung a panicked arm out against the wall beside him. Heathrow continued in an uninterrupted trot. He leapt down steps two at a time to catch up to her and asked, “What was that?”

“A bomb. With any luck, one of ours,” she answered, matter of fact. The door labeled “Sublevel 2” opened under her hands with a torturous wailing shriek. This far into the ground, the air was cold, clammy, in sharp contrast to outside’s arid heat.

Thick shelves filled the room, attached to a system of rollers to save space. Only one shelving unit per row would be accessible at a time. This is the morgue, Al realized under the green tinged light. It was far larger than he expected, a look to the side confirmed that the room spanned nearly the entire hospital’s footprint. And it was apparently full.

“Claude, show yourself. I got an assistant for you,” Heathrow shouted.

A mumble came from a corner to their right. A man with a chaotic nest of black hair emerged and shambled over. Al reckoned he was about the same age of himself. Claude yawned enormously behind a raised hand and ignored Heathrow’s irritated tsk. He extended a hand to Al. “Nice to meet you. Claude Adlerson.”

“Albert Elric,” Al replied as he shook Claude’s hand. Despite the sleep mused expression and riot of hair sticking up slightly to one side, his handshake was strong and firm.

Heathrow disapprovingly tsked at Claude again, “Were you napping?”

“The bomb woke me up,” Claude deadpanned. “No, of course not. Why’d you ask that?”

“Your tie’s crooked and your hair’s a mess.”

Claude shrugged his narrow shoulders, smooth and easy. “They always are.”

“Elric’s helping you clean up down here. Show him the ropes. I have work to do upstairs.” Everything Dr. Heathrow says came out like slugs shot from a sniper’s rifle: high powered and precise, with little business trifling over side matters.

She received a slow nod. Claude scratched the stubble creeping up his jaw and titled his head back just-so, eye towards the ceiling and through. Any drowsy lightheartedness melted off as he asked her, “How many more bodies do you think we’ll get today?”

Heathrow shot him a sharp glance. “Whatever I tell you, it’ll be an underestimate. They haven’t started for the day upstairs yet. Get going.”

With that, she spun on her heels and slammed back up the stairs. Claude stuffed both hands into a pair of his coat’s multitudes of pockets. Like Heathrow, he gave Al a considering look, dragging from head to toe, mulling over something in the room’s chilly silence, punctuated by a rhythmic shudder Al felt through the soles of his shoes more than heard. “Ever seen a dead body?” he asked.

Al has. “I have.”

“Ever buried one?”

“No.”

“Well, today’s a day you learn something new,” Claude declared with forced levity and started walking backwards. “We aren’t actually doing the digging ourselves, buncha soldiers doing that for us. We’re just sorting out which poor fellows down here get to return to the dirt. If it weren’t for the trouble it’d take to haul these bodies out far enough from camp, or to get the fuel in the first place, we’d probably be burning them instead. Less manual labor. But folks in charge don’t want the smell so close to where they sleep, I suppose.”

He narrowly avoided crashing into a shelf, elbow first, and swung around to walking normally. “Course, I’d most prefer to send folks home to family, but that’s not really a choice anymore, is it?”

Al hummed in agreement and otherwise kept silent. They approached the corner Claude earlier emerged from. A gap opened between some shelves, revealing a cramped table shoved against the wall in the still tight space. Papers roosted on its surface in fluttering heaps and pipes. The layer sat several inches thick, and Al instantly knew no one except Claude could find anything in that hoard. Case in point, Claude pushed pages of type with no discernable differences to Al’s eye to a side, sloping up a precarious stack jutting out colored tongues, and yanked out a packet bound with easily detached metal rings.

His fingers flicked through the pages of tiny font and came to land about three-quarters of the way through. A hand yanked out a colored slip without looking. Al peaked over his shoulder at the pages set onto the unstable surface with a thump and realized a significant portion of what he assumed to be typeface was incredibly neat handwriting sprouting off into the margins. The same handwriting scrawled out a series of numbers and letters onto the slip.

“Here,” Claude waved the slip, eyes locked still on flipping further through his book of records. “These are the serials of the bodies we’re clearing out first. Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out the label system. That way,” he pointed, still not looking at Al, “covers the lower numbers and storage is alphabetical in ascending order towards the wall. Numbers increase to that way.” His hand now pointed to the opposite side of the room.

He wrote a few more serial codes down on a different scrap of paper and shoved this sheet into one of his breast pockets. “We’ll do the first few together so you have an idea of how to get that stubborn old elevator working.”

A few rows down, they split apart. Al found his first serial number five deep into the bank of closed mouth, grim faced, matte gray metal faces of the closed drawers. Al set his hand on the handle and felt its chill through his rubber gloves slipped on at Claude’s instructions. His fingers curled, stilled. He stood in silence, staring at the sealed line. If – _when – _he turned that thin, metal bar resting against his palm, pulled the weight against his fingers he’d fought so hard to return to flesh, there’d be no more going back. Just as there’d been no going back when he strode into that recruitment office, as he’d climbed onto the train, as he’d set foot on this land crying blood. Inside would be...

The handle clanked open and the drawer's wheels squeaked as they rolled along their tracks and a whisper rose into the basement’s air, among the ghost of all they’d done in this building, in this nation, purpose transcribed in a circle - “_Oh_.”

* * *

As a general rule, Maes avoided the medical tents best he could despite the continued ongoing attempts on his life. He managed plenty well so far. Since Roy and Riza worked primarily from long distances, Maes alse didn’t have many occasions for accompanying either of them for an injury. He did pass by the doctors and nurses’ territory on the way to and from command and it was only thanks to dodging out of the way of wounded rushed past on stretchers that he almost crashed right into Alphonse Elric.

There’s a yelp in his ear to match his “woah” and he already had a hand flung out to stabilize himself and the guy stumbling. “Sorry about that,” Maes said and froze at golden eyes – Maes has only ever seen golden eyes on one person before – blinking back at him with the same surprise.

Since Roy recruited the young Fullmetal Alchemist onto his team, Maes kept an eye and a file on the kid. There was his brother Al, an absent father, and a mother recently passed away from illness. Nowhere was there any mention of extended family and the facial structure of this man was too similar to Edward Elric’s for anything other than a familial relation.

The other man was already backing into the storage rooms of medical supplies with “excuse me, sorry, pardon,” against the rush. He ducked almost out of sight when awareness clicked back in for Maes and he called after the retreating back clade in the dirty scrubs of the medical assistants, “Hey, wait up!”

Maes pushed a body out of the way. He had time to spare on pulling this sudden thread today and if this guy was half the alchemist as the Elric brothers, maybe he could finally get an explanation for how the hell he was here in the past. Taking a chance, he yelled, “Hey, Elric!”

His head whipped around in even greater shock, giving Maes enough time to catch up. Some eyes drifted over to the commotion Maes was making and slid off. “You are related to Edward and Alphonse Elric, right?” Maes asked. Very closely related, Maes modified to himself now that he had a better view of the eyes and bone structure of this mystery Elric. He could imagine Ed growing into a similar appearance. Since Al never took his armor off around Maes, he couldn’t project that one out.

Wary eyes regarded Maes, then Elric grabbed his arm and shoved them into a conveniently empty tent. “How do you know about them?”

Maes shrugged and scrapped around for a believable story. He stalled for time with, “It’s a long and slightly classified story. Who are you?”

Tension pulled Elric tight and his thinned lips held his words locked. The golden stare continued combing for tells, what exactly Maes couldn’t figure out. “Albert Elric. Assistant to the field medics. How do you know the Elric name? Tell me, Captain.”

The name came out with just barely a stutter, just a catch, where his first name didn’t come out as smoothly and quickly as the family name and something in the earnestness struck familiar. Maes has been shot by a shapeshifter stealing Gracia’s face, the military triggered this bloodbath in Ishval for reasons he doesn’t have enough alchemic knowledge to decode, he’s _back in time_. In for a cens, Maes mourned for his worldview and sense of sanity never recovering and said, “Albert Elric, mind if I call you Al? Have I shown you my sweet daughter Elicia?”

Al – _Alphonse_ – Elric gasped and said, “Lieutenant Colonel? How are you here?”

“That’s what I want to know too.”

Maes watched him glance around them, peering into shadows and at moving canvas. Alphonse laid a hand on his arm, leaned in to deliver, “Not here, not now. I get off shift at 0100. That work for you?”

“Yes, where?”

Al’s open face mulled over the choices for a moment, then he said, “By the mess tents. I'll meet you there, Lieutenant Colonel. It’s a long story, and a bit hard to believe.”

_Well, we’re in the past_, Maes doesn’t say. _That’s already set expectations plenty high_.

* * *

Even if it was illegal, Maes and the general public speculated more than once on whether Ametris’ military transmuted gold out of dirt to fund itself. Tanks, ordnance, uniforms, food, medical supplies, salaries, stipends to families of the fallen, gilded comforts to the high command – running the largest employer of a nation raked up expenses quickly. Any serendipitous gold production was never confirmed and couldn’t have been performing on a grand scale if it _had_, though. Despite interruptions brought on by constant wars, Amestris’ taxable economy chugged along well enough and subsequent taxes did honestly cover the official budget well enough.

Still – completely wiping out a population of its own citizen and the constant drain of military casualties assaulted population growth in a way that only a minor miracle kept the nation off the ledge over into social chaos. In the years that Maes saw, the nation hadn’t recovered yet from the killing.

Creta, Drachma, and Aerugo also weren’t taking “Sorry, the previous leaders of our nation where fostering wars and conflict for a plan to swallow god, mind signing these peace treaties and trade agreements?” in full confidence. War and suffering made its home in Amestris’ bones for so long, who was the say they really could let go of such ingrained habits?

“Have you ever thought about what will happen to all these soldiers when we tell them to go home?” Maes asked Roy in the mess hall’s roar of white noise.

Roy speared a slice of sausage on his fork. “From Ishval?”

“From Ishval, but also in that beautiful future we envisioned.” Maes cut himself a helping of a limp mass passing for vegetables. “In times of peace, I can’t see justification for draining the nation’s coffers maintaining an army this large.”

“In the simplest sense, they’ll go home,” Roy said. He chewed and swept together more food onto his fork. “In a deeper sense … I don’t know how well anyone can go home from somewhere like here.”

“It’ll be a lot of men and women looking for new jobs. New jobs that might not be immediately available.”

Roy spent the time eating another mouthful to watch Maes. In his eyes was a brittle frustration he hadn’t managed to shake off until hitting Lieutenant Colonel himself. He took another bite, still thinking.

Maes hadn’t seen Hawkeye all day; she must have been on a mission. Roy evidentially also began considering her one of his, though perhaps not entirely consciously, since tense stress from sitting on the sidelines, waiting, had been locking up his back all day. Nothing Maes did to distract him would or ever will unlock that tension until she returned to his side in mostly one piece.

“You think the government and the military will provide unemployment services for its veterans?” Roy finally asked. “Would that be enough?”

“After coming from the structure of the military and constant combat? No, I don’t think so. If the government has any sense, it’ll also be wary of so many citizens set loose with combat skills,” Maes replied.

The room swelled with the meal rushing picking up steam. Against the swollen noise and smells, Maes cleaned off his plate, Roy doing the same and said, standing up, “You seem to think there’ll be trouble.”

“Considering what the military’s done here and what further actions it may now be emboldened to undertake, I don’t think the civilian population will give it free reign forever. Widespread discontent might not come any time soon, or ever if the cards are played right, but it’s something to consider.” Maes stood as well and followed Roy to the dish return station. “The current brass certainly isn’t.”

They dumped the dirty dishes and silverware into the bins stuffed full and dripping soapy water splashed over the sides. Outside, the dry heat wasn’t much better than the crush inside but at least Maes no longer felt like he’d loose his hearing trying to make his own thoughts heard across the tables’ rough wooden planks. He followed Roy towards the other’s barracks. At the end of the row leading to Roy’s quarters, he stopped and broke their mutual silence, “How are you still able to think about the future all the time? Dealing with every day is already enough, so how?”

“I have to.” Roy glanced at Maes, who continued, “I told you, I fight so I can survive. I survive because I have a future to return home to. If I don’t constantly think about the future, about the world I want Gracia and I to raise a family in, then what am I surviving for?”

There weren’t strong enough winds in Ishval to blow the ashes from Roy’s fires onto him. For the sake of the men he didn’t remember the names of, he’d been getting better at arriving at the scene unnoticed and unannounced until the firestorm charred everything in sight. Roy didn’t have to enter town, drive the offense into the central square, on every mission. He never told Maes if he did anyways in the silence after a fight; Maes smelled the clinging sent of burnt flesh on his gloves often enough for his answer.

Roy split away from Maes down the dim row.

“Good night, Hughes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing the Roy from Ishval compared to how he is later on doesn’t stop being a bit weird.


End file.
